Was 2013 the Year of the Kegged Cocktail?

If not, well, they're coming. It's just a question of when, where, and how.

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There have been reports of kegged cocktails in Minneapolis. There have been rumors of 'Crafthouse Cocktails: Southside' coming out of Chicago. They grumble about it in Seattle. ("Nothing craft or sexy about it," Gregg Holcomb told Eater. "The art is the love the bartender puts into your drink 'in the moment.') Though they've existed and have been a staples of parties at home for years (as in, pre-batch cocktails — that giant tub of alcohol you walk by as you listen to someone telling you a story about their college roommate from freshman year bringing ashes to the dorm but being unable to do anything about it because the student handbook didn't actually explicitly forbid the presence of human remains (an honest-to-god true story I heard this week — remind me to tell you all more about it later)), 'cocktails on tap' (or 'draft cocktails') moving into restaurants and bars has been unique to 2013. There were earlier hints and earlier traces in earlier times, but 2013 really was the year. Purportedly.

Given that Drink exists in Boston and went from being the Best American Cocktail Bar in 2011 to the Best Cocktail Bar in the World this year (per 'Tales of the Cocktail,' at least) and scores of other bars exist across the city (and the range, too: there's Lord Hobo, Deep Ellum, Phoenix Landing, The Bell in Hand Tavern, Pour House, et. al.) — I figured it was worth poking at this either/or see-saw here just a bit. Insofar as I've been able to determine, though (and, oh, the raised eyebrows I got in Newburyport and Portsmouth), there's only one place that has kegged cocktails in the Northeast, and it's The Fairsted Kitchen in Brookline, Massachusetts. I say this to explain my immediately preceding snark. (Or smarm. Or Scocca? One of those three.)

Brookline is a nod away from Boston, and — according to friends — it looks a little bit like Santiago, though I have yet to verify that firsthand. Fairsted Kitchen exists within window's distance of the Green Line — I watched the subway cars move back and forth through the snow and night as a baby girl seated next to her mother made the bartender who had an absolute echo of Zadie Smith about her laugh (she was entering her seventh week working there) — and the cocktails they had on draft were… well, they were curious. I had a Bijou — as in, gin, vermouth, génépy, and orange bitters — and though it was certainly strong (again — vermouth and génépy: it's not paint-thinner-masquerading-as-vodka territory, but its on its way there), it was very… one-note. When I asked her to mix another drink so I could compare the two, I was given a slightly tweaked Manhattan, and it ended up feeling like a three-note drink, and the immediately discernible difference was striking. She preferred the latter "because — otherwise — why would we be here? It'd be like the checkout line at CVS." I overheard someone talking about a dance party on Christmas Eve as she replied and imagined a room full of people in 60's get-up dancing to Otis Redding, everyone's arms doing that kind of synchronous shovel.

Will draft cocktails kill off the art of bartending? Probably not. Keith Goldston — Master Sommelier and wine director at Range in Washington DC — agrees. "If draft cocktails take off (and that's a big if), I imagine it would be a lot like pre-packaged dinners and it seems like they actually helped spur the celebrity chef craze/food network/cooking at home renaissance, so I could actually see the art of bartending growing."

The U.S. is the largest wine-consuming nation in the world, and what happens in New York and L.A. sets trends for the rest of the industry across the world, and it's hard to imagine the culture of appreciation of wine collapsing in upon itself and ending up as nothing more than people looking for PBR or Bud Lite-styled wine. I get that there's cheap, Trader Joe wine out there — remember Robin Williams's old riff on Gore Vidal selling Thunderbird wine? — but note that I said "culture of appreciation." Its hard to imagine poorly done kegged cocktails inveigling themselves into that particular critical space in such an emphatic fashion. Also, Goldston added, "I don't see any reason why they can't be as good. Just look at draft beer versus bottled." Plus: beer, wine, and spirits are all about getting it wrong, experimenting, and doing it again.

Case in point: Dale DeGroff, President and founder of the Museum of the American Cocktail, is very much in favor of kegged cocktails, and pointed towards the Tippling Brothers as an example of smart kegged cocktails done well, and who themselves have consulted with Erick Castro. Kegged cocktails are about — per DeGroff — giving you "an opportunity to control your bar." When he was working at The Rainbow Room, DeGroff "started batching drinks partially [to deal with expected turnover], so I was able to serve literally thousands of drinks a night using that technique." And it's just the beginning: "Wine companies and even vermouth companies are doing it. They're even selling kegs of wine now. So you're going to see lots and lots more of that. Half-a-dozen places in Chicago have it."

He was also keen to remind me that there was more than one way to pre-batch drinks, citing the emergence of "Shrubs" that could be made for "12-18 people like that," and that you could barrel age your drinks, too. "The problem is that there are some cocktails that just don't want to be barrel-aged. A Manhattan could be proof of that. [That part of the process] could be seriously improved." And if you were to try and go forward with barrel-aging your drinks, you'd want to look for "some ingredients that have already seen some wood. Stay away from Negronis, etc."

When reached by phone, Paul Tanguay of The Tippling Brothers asserted that there was no unique argument that could be made for a kegged cocktail's taste, as it was exactly the same as a regularly mixed cocktail, but when I descended into the basement of Drink and had a cardinal and a snow-cone variation of a mint julep — courtesy of a bartender named Steve, who brought out a copy of David Wondrich's "Punch" for me to browse through at my leisure and attacked a giant block of ice that sat in front of me like it was cheese waiting to be grated — I was still left undecided.

There is a future to kegged cocktails. It's just a question of how we get there.